Lumberhill Review: A Charming Party Game Hindered By Controls

Games built around working cooperatively with friends are much less common than they used to be, but All In! Games' Lumberhill creates a couch co-op experience that that is wonderful to play with friends, family, and even young kids. Many of Lumberhill's features and controls share some common DNA with other goofy party games Overcooked and Totally Reliable Delivery Service, but there is still enough variety to keep it from feeling dated. Lumberhill's unresponsive controls and imprecise actions tend to hold it back considerably, however, resulting in an uneven experience.

In Lumberhill players take control of a lumberjack and must complete a series of tasks across different game modes. The majority of these tasks are mundane, like chopping down trees and then delivering the wood to a nearby mill, or guiding grazing sheep to a barn. While these tasks are being worked on, dangerous terrain like holes in the ground, aggressive animals, and even more ridiculous threats like dinosaurs or meteor impacts have to be avoided. Whether the player is alone or playing with friends they must find the best way to navigate a level that avoids any of these threats.

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It is possible to play Lumberhill in single-player, but doing so removes a lot of the chaos, just like in Overcooked. The main campaign of Lumberhill can be played through entirely with up to three other people either online or locally. With more people in a game, it becomes easier to multitask and focus on several things at once rather than just complete one task at a time. With more characters on screen, it also becomes much more difficult to move around the map and do things like guide animals without them taking the incorrect path. Characters will also tend to bump into each other a lot and mess up each others actions, which will force a team to have strong communication skills.

There is also a versus mode that has a group of players competing against each other. Sometimes they will be working to complete tasks against each other to see who is able to earn the most number of points in a level. Other times, one player will be working to complete tasks while others will be in control of aggressive animals that are capable of harming the human character or knocking them around. The competitiveness of these modes make for some great fun and add an additional challenge to Lumberhill.

Where Lumberhill runs into issues is that its controls tend to be frustrating to work with. Task-based party games are usually challenging, but the difficulty is centered around the tasks themselves rather than the inability to control a character. In Lumberhill the characters tend take far too long to respond to inputs which makes for avoiding threats difficult, and picking up items in the world is imprecise. If there are two or three different item types in a given location it is sometimes impossible to select the specific object that is needed for a task. Mostly this means that Lumberhill's chaos makes things less fun and more infuriating on the more difficult levels.

Lumberhill is a great party game to break out when friends come over or for parents who want to game with their younger children. The unresponsiveness of its controls can make the game frustrating to play at times, but those who are just playing casually shouldn't have too many problems. Those who need a chaotic multiplayer title could do a lot worse that Lumberhill's goofy lumberjack antics.

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Lumberhill is available now on PC. Screen Rant was provided with a Steam code for the purposes of this review.

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